The Connectors

Share

The Connectors

Meet the hypernetworked nodes who secretly run the world.

In 1974, a Harvard sociologist made a seemingly unremarkable discovery. It is, in fact, who you know. His study asked several hundred white-collar workers how they'd landed their jobs. More than half credited a "personal connection." Duh. But then it got interesting: The researcher, Mark Granovetter, dug deeper and discovered that four-fifths of these backdoor hires barely knew their benefactors. As it turns out, close friends are great for road trips, intimate dinners, and the occasional interest-free loan, but they suck for job leads and blind dates - they know the same people you do. In other words, it's not so much who you know, but who you vaguely know. Granovetter called the phenomenon "the strength of weak ties." He had discovered the human node.

In a computer network, a node performs the crucial task of data routing, playing digital matchmaker to packets of information. In a social network, a node is the person whose PDA runneth over with people they met once on an airplane. Nodes host countless dinner parties, leave movie theaters to answer cell phones, and actually enjoy attending conferences. It seems like they know everybody, because they very nearly do - and most important, their connections are from all walks of life, creating a panoply of weak ties. Mensches with an intellectual bent, nodes perform invaluable feats of synthesis, bringing together thinkers, scholars, captains of industry, and the odd professional rugby player, all for the sake of adding new spices to their melting pots. Great books, products, partnerships, and technological innovations form in their chaotic wake, and one could make an argument that they run the world, if only by accident. But chief among the node's attributes is a tendency to stay behind the scenes, which raises an irresistible question: Who are these people, what do they do, and how do they do it? Wired combed our corner of the earth to pick the brains of prime specimens.

Node Cred: Shirky, 39, is one of the handful of people with justifiable claim to the digerati moniker. He's become a consistently prescient voice on networks, social software, and technology's effects on society. He publishes everywhere from the Harvard Business Review to The Wall Street Journal, but his most influential essays (like last February's "Power Laws, Weblogs, and Inequality") appear on Shirky.com.

Operating system: "I like to use email to broker introduction. There are three levels of email introduction: One is when you just provide a party with the other party's info. The second is when you say, 'Yeah, and use my name.' The third is sending email to both, CC'ing them. You have to be careful about which level you use. If you do it right, it's just enough of a spark to get people close."

Node wisdom: "The most important person you know is someone you haven't met. There was this urban myth rocketing around the Valley in the '90s that 500 people - certain CEOs and venture capitalists - ran the world. Then Shawn Fanning came along."

>> THE MUSIC NODETed Cohen: Senior VP for digital development at EMI and a liaison between the file-sharing and music communities.

Node Cred: In his nearly 40 years in the music biz, Cohen, 54, has collected 5,500 contacts. In 1982, Warner Bros. asked him to join a new media think tank, an idea ahead of its time. It included such luminaries as Xerox PARC legend Alan Kaye.

Crossover artist: Cohen became one of the only content guys with respect in the tech community, and, in 1999, he was engaged by both the RIAA and Napster to broker a compromise. He recently helped negotiate the licensing agreements that let iTunes launch.

Most important match: "Hooking up Sonique, Winamp's competition, with Microsoft, who hooked them up with Lycos, who bought them for $30 million. I got a BMW as a thank-you."

Secret weapon: Breakfast. "Everyone's awake and less inclined to linger as people do over lunch. My standard line is 'So-and-so meet so-and-so. Here's why you should work together. Now pay me five bucks.'" He's thrown an open-invite New Year's brunch since 1974. "One year," says Cohen, who does all the cooking himself, sometimes for 200 guests, "I tried to take a break, but 30 people showed up, so I wound up going down to a 7-Eleven, coming back, and making everyone breakfast."

>> THE GAMING NODESeamus Blackley: Cocreator of the Xbox and its chief evangelist both inside and outside Microsoft. Blackley, 35, left last year to start a game development company, Capital Entertainment Group. He writes an influential column for UK gaming mag Develop.

Node Cred: When Bill Gates decided to enter the console gaming market, someone had to go out and persuade developers - most of whom considered Microsoft the Evil Empire - to write for the nascent platform. "I visited 80 percent of the developers on earth," says Blackley, who became the public face of Xbox and, in the process, a crucial link between the gaming industry, Hollywood, and the music business.

Speed dial: Steven Spielberg.

Motivation: "It's about achieving a state of coolness. I want to hook up people who instinctively go after stuff that makes them hop up and down with excitement. Money is just a lubricant; it unseizes machinery." The people Blackley adds to his network, he says, "aren't looking to score a point on the gross."

Node Wisdom: Blackley says there are power laws, or tipping points, that operate in social networks. "Once you know enough people, suddenly you can't stop. It's like Pringles."

Node Cred: "We were working for King World, the company that distributes Oprah. When I sold the company very successfully, that gave me a lot of cred with Oprah. She hired me to represent her when [Hollywood mega-producer] Marcy Carsey and [former Nickelodeon president] Gerry Laybourne wanted to buy her library for Oxygen. Then it got interesting: Gerry asked me to lead a round of investment in the cable channel. I introduced her to Paul Allen, whose investment led to an offshore group coming in and giving Oxygen cash at three times its valuation."

Most important matches: Peretsman, 49, started out at Salomon Brothers during the go-go '80s and helped put together many of the most spectacular deals of the last five years, including Viacom's purchase of B.E.T., Vivendi-Universal's $10.3 billion acquisition of USA Network's entertainment assets, and the $46.5 billion sale of MediaOne to AT&T.

>> THE SCIENCE NODEJan Witkowski: Director of the Banbury Center, a biotech confab at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, in New York.

Node Cred: Witkowski, 56, may have the most valuable Rolodex in the world of science. Working directly under double helix co-discoverer James Watson, he regularly calls former Nobel laureates when putting together his invite-only Banbury conferences. "People tend to return my calls," he says.

Speed dial: John H. Marburger III, science adviser to George W. Bush and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and Harold Varmus, Nobel laureate and National Institutes of Health czar.

Most important match: Witkowski organized a conference on DNA technology and forensic science in the late '80s. Attendees included Alec Jeffreys, inventor of DNA fingerprinting, and Eric Lander, genomics guru and MIT prof, as well as cops, criminal attorneys, ethicists, and civil libertarians. Legal scholars Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld met there and went on to found the Innocence Project, which helped free nearly 140 wrongly convicted people through the use of DNA fingerprinting.

Whose dinner party would you most like to attend? "Charles Darwin's. Not only did he change the scientific world, he changed how people think. And if you read his biographies, he was clearly a very nice man."

>> THE VALLEY NODELinda Stone: Former Microsoft ambassador; currently advises the power elite and consults for Segway's Dean Kamen.

Node Cred: Old-school network. Stone, 48, directed strategic initiatives at Apple and Microsoft through the late '80s and '90s; her reputation for having the ear of people like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and ex-Apple CEO John Sculley prompted Steve Ballmer to enlist her to soften Redmond's image.

Know your enemy: Stone brought the barbarians through the gate and straight to the podium, starting a Microsoft speaker series that featured open source maven Eric Raymond and copyleft theorist (and Wired columnist) Lawrence Lessig.

Secret Weapon: The dinner party. "I've developed a seating algorithm. I don't think of who will sit next to whom, but who sits diagonally. I make sure people with high energy are thoughtfully distributed. I scatter them, so one corner of the table is always lighting up."

Speed Dial: General Wesley Clark and Danny Hillis.

Node wisdom: Stone coined the phrase "continuous partial attention," popularized several years later at the 2001 World Economic Forum. CPA describes a key characteristic of the node life. "With CPA, we focus on the topic at hand but are constantly scanning the periphery for new input and adjusting our attention accordingly. It's different than multitasking. It's knowing when to hit call-waiting and when to ignore it."

Node Cred: A real-world Zelig on a global scale, Garbus, 63, has gone to bat for a bewildering variety of high-profile clients, including Lenny Bruce, Spike Lee, Samuel Beckett, and Andrei Sakharov. He helped Vaclav Havel craft the Czech constitution, and he's currently representing French composer Jacques Loussier in his suit against rap royalty Eminem and Dr. Dre.

Most important match: An inveterate matchmaker, Garbus knew that close chum Phyllis Grann, then editor-in-chief and CEO of book publisher Putnam Berkeley, wanted to find a buyer for her company. He introduced her to Penguin CEO Peter Mayer, and voilé! The resulting merger created Penguin Putnam, the second-largest consumer publisher in the US.

Speed dial: Al Pacino and Ken Starr.

Secret weapon: Broadway. "When I think people should meet, I like to get four to six tickets to the theater. Art is a transformative experience, and it can create a quick bond between people that wouldn't otherwise take place. Plus, dinner usually follows, and we always have something to talk about."

>> THE TOKYO NODEJoichi Ito: Runs a $40.6 million VC firm, Neoteny, from his hometown of Inba, Japan; best known for his must-read blog, Joi Ito's Web.

Node Cred: Ito, 37, rubs shoulders with the likes of Timothy Leary and Stanford Ovshinsky, inventor of the NiMH battery. Over the past seven years, he's worked with Ars Electronica to define Internet art.

Power hub: Two years ago, at the World Economic Forum, Ito stunned attendees by breaking with Japanese corporate orthodoxy, saying it was time for Japan to overhaul its business culture and start rewarding entrepreneurs. Far from taking offense, Sony chair Nobuyuki Idei (a founder of the forum) asked Ito to repeat the rant at a gathering of corporate titans later that year, and Davos chief Klaus Schwab asked Ito to head a "Blueprint for Japan 2020" this year.

Geek cred: In 1987, Ito dropped out of the University of Chicago to become a DJ and computer network consultant.

Work the crowd: He's a board member of the digital archive and copyleft think tank Creative Commons and advises the Japanese government on education, technology, and consumer protection.

Speed dial: John Gage, chief researcher for Sun; Yotaro Kobayashi, chair of Fuji Xerox; and Sadako Ogata, former UN high commissioner for refugees.